A tornado warning for Little Rock, Arkansas, with a FEMA administrator and more than 200 miles from Readyville, TX, according to Mayor Joe Biden
The weekend tornadoes have already left 32 dead and dozens of others injured as they ripped homes apart in several states, and more are on the way.
It will take resources beyond our means to clean up in one of the hardest hit areas, according to the mayor.
Next door, Tennessee reported the highest death toll with 15 weather-related fatalities confirmed over the weekend, including 9 deaths in a single county, McNairy County.
“Had they not, looking at the devastation that we had, our death toll could have been in the hundreds,” Buck told CNN. The power of mom nature is something not to be underestimated.
In Illinois, four people were killed, including one person who died after the roof of the Apollo Theatre in Belvidere collapsed Friday with more than 200 people gathered inside.
President Joe Biden issued a major disaster declaration for Arkansas ahead of a trip by FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell to survey the damage and determine needs on the ground.
Criswell on Sunday toured the city of Little Rock, Arkansas, where more than 2,900 structures were impacted when an EF3 tornado that roared through Pulaski and Lonoke counties came through, whipping estimated peak winds of 165 mph, authorities said.
Little Rock has rallied as a city to recover and begin to rebuild after the storms, according to the mayor.
The tornado ripped apart Teresa Blankenship’s home and flipped over her new car, according to CNN.
More than 200 miles away, an EF-2 tornado also tore through the Readyville, Tennessee, area early Saturday morning, ripping the roof off the US Post Office building and destroying the historic Readyville Mill, as well as numerous homes along one street, Rutherford County Government said in a news release.
Reconstructing from the Destructions in Whiteland, Missouri on Tuesday. The West Coast to Central Missouri, High-Wind Alerts are in Place
In Whiteland, residents spent hours trying to rebuild from the destroyed homes. They looked for wedding dresses, high school diplomas, keys, wallets and other items.
“We’re trying to go through what we can find, what we can actually pull out of the rooms where the walls have collapsed in,” one resident told CNN affiliate WTHR as he searched through the destroyed relative’s home. “By looking at it, they’re lucky they made it out alive.”
We heard a sound similar to a train. It was just loud. We had to hold our ears in order to keep them from getting bad pressure. Everybody was running to the basement and we got down there, I heard glass shattering,” one Sullivan resident told WTHR. “When we came back up everything was just gone.”
A Level 4 out of 5 “moderate” risk of storms has been put into place for eastern Iowa, northeastern Missouri and western Illinois on Tuesday.
The Weather Service says there will be more severe weather Tuesday in parts of the Mississippi Valley, as well as the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys.
State Emergency Management officials asked that people remain aware of the weather, have multiple ways to receive warnings, and keep up to date with the forecast.
There are over a million people under an “extremely critical” risk of fire weather across parts of eastern New Mexico, across the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles and southwestern Kansas on Tuesday.
More than 50 million people are under high wind alerts from the West Coast to central Missouri, where wind gusts of up to 60 mph are expected. Red flag warnings are in place for more than 15 million people.